Ploafmaster General

So I haven't exactly been posting much here lately, especially not about Italy like I said I would.

Truth is, I've been pretty busy lately with work, writing things for A Pair of Pathetic Peripatetics, and living my life with my lovely Valerie.

So I'm posting here more or less to let people know that I still care about this site. Even though only 4 people a month actually check it out.

Maybe it's more for my sake so I don't abandon the project. I really want to make a habit out of capturing my thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

Anyway, I'm still around, and I'll keep posting!

Okay, after working on a placeholder design for A Pair of Pathetic Peripatetics as well as some writing for said site, I've finally gotten around to disclosing some of the fine details of the trip to Roma!

What better way to start than with the food?

If there's one item from the vast repitoires of Italy's kitchens with which most Americans are familiar, it's pizza. I must say, pizza is quite delicious in Roma, and certainly average pizza in Roma is better than 99% of the pie here in the states. The real treasure, however, is in the funky, divey city of Napoli (Naples). Here you will find the granddaddy of modern pizza, with it's puffy outer crust and flavorful dough. Pizza Margherita is the traditional dish in Napoli, and is the very picture of perfection through simplicity. The components are as follows:

1. Pizza dough
   
2. crushed tomatoes
   
3. fresh buffalo mozzerela cheese
   
4. sunflower oil
   
5. fresh basil for garnish in the middle
   

That's really it. There's barely enough crushed tomato to cover the surface of the crust, and torn pieces of the fresh cheese scattered across the top, and a healthy drizzling of the oil. This is cooked fast and hot in what appeared to be a coal-fired brick oven as old as the 1923 restaurant in which Valerie and I sampled it. The result? Savory, smokey crust you could eat by the pound, even without toppings. Everything blended together like it was the way food was meant to be...

But I gush...

There was, of course, loads of pasta. Two particular culinary wonders stood out - the tortellini, far more tasty than any here in the states, and just about anything served "alla bolognese". The latter were dishes served in a simple but intensely flavorful meat sauce, so good you'd crave it by the spoonful if you'd had it.

And finally, the gelato. Words cannot describe the Italian perfection of ice cream, so I will not attempt such heresy.

In fact, I need to stop writing now, because the lack of food from the Mother Land is quite depressing.

Ciao!

So here's a link to a shload of digi-cam pics from my trip to Roma! Almost all of them were taken by my wonderful wife, except for most of the night shots (because I had a steadier hand).

This is perhaps only half the digital shots, but they're the creme, as it were. Once I get my film shots, I'll try to post more.

Remember, more deets from the trip coming soon!

My wife and I are back from BEAUTIFUL Roma, Italia. In the coming days I'll have a few specific pieces dealing with the various aspects of the trip.

Stay tuned!!!

Holy craplacticus, Batman - watch this video now. Great music, sweet Samuri Jack - style video.

Alright, tomorrow my wife and I head out to Rome. We'll be gone for about a week and a half, but when we return, I'll have plenty of stories to tell...

Stay tuned!

A Pair of Pathetic Peripatetics is now live. It looks boring, and there's barely any content, but that'll change soon enough. Enjoy!

Soon, oh yes, very soon, my brother Mugs and I will be creating a new website called "A Pair of Pathetic Peripatetics."

This website will stay up as the content of the new site will likely be more focused on discussion, issues, humor, or who knows. The content will be jointly edited by my bro and I, and I will attempt to work on some kind of graphics for the site (yeah, I still have to work on this one first).

Here's to another grand web adventure!

Well, for the 3 people on the whole of the 'Net who've read my past several posts (Rome excluded), you're probably wondering what that was all about. So I'll explain it to you, as dryly as possible (for added effect).

When I was in high school, one of my best friends, Robert, and I wrote a short series of near-stream-of-consciousness prose. And if you knew anything about what goes on within our respective conscious minds, you would run in terror.

At any rate, I was digging through an online archive of the web (kind of circular, don't you think?) and came across my old website from high school c.1998. This waste of webspace contained one small but excellent section dedicated to said brain-drippings from Robert and myself. I promptly copied them to a text file for posterity, and decided to post them on this website to once again share the demented nature of my friend and me.

That's it.

I'm preparing to make my first international trip in my life - on Tuesday, the 18th of this month, Valerie and I are heading to Rome.

I'm pretty psyched about this for two reasons - mainly because I've never left the country, but also because I'm heading to the land of some of my ancestors: Italy!

I'm gonna go nuts over the food, take loads of pictures, and buy everybody's birthday/Christmas gifts there. I'm going to stand in speechless awe when I stare up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or walk around the Colliseum. I will try coffee in Italy even though I don't like it. I will drink wine. I will butcher the pronunciation of many places, names, and menu items. I will return with a sore neck from having turned this-way-and-that to absorb everything I walked past.

Eccellente.

Incidently, Fred Hornblower slipped on a banana peel while riding the roller coaster to Texas. While sliding across the waxed recesses of linoleum carpeting, Fred flatulated magnanimously(I can't spell worth carp). Meanwhilst, Papa John's Pizza exploded spontaneously shouting, "You're so incorrigable!" The shining of the sun certainly does illuminate the tombstones across the street, thought the rubber chicken. The prowling feline(the name brand of certain types of canines) spontaneously started jamming with his harpsichord , then he got jiggy widit. Brick outhouses don't smell like roses, because the walls have teeth. We all know that cattle excrement feels odd between skyscrapers. The rat just had a healthy litter of deer. He is right close to this rubber chicken. So is Jerge (pronounced Jerge). The dandruff skipped from flea to flea with exponential forces of equilibrium, producing pungent smelling J curves on the third moon of Nike. The Impropability Ball just grew catnip under its toes within its armpit jam. Nasal fairies met for a Smurf convention with Bo Diddly, and decided it wasn't a brilliant idea to serve tofu slices to acid tripping marmasets. Belly button lint was fed to the rubber chicken. Nose cherries abounded. The chimes rang at the wedding of the neighborhood weightlifting housewife, Cloie and the Naked Cowboy Man.

Mole woman with her flagellum extended, dove into a pool of concrete fish nuggets. After displaying their cool ability to make armpit noises with their teeth, the nuggets burrowed into her skull with a 5/8 inch toenail bit, causing green corpuscules to exude from her pocketbook. At that very instant, the Improbability Ball shot out of nowhere, and ressurrected Sam the Barbarian. Sam, while eating green eggs and ham, crashed into a mental block of worm slime. While pondering the meaning of cheese, Mole Woman discovered Dweezil Zappa falling haphazardly from a petri dish. The bacteria in the petri dish decided to make Mole Woman queen. They lived happily ever after in pestilence and chunky creamed corn.

Jack dreamed of his love affair with the naked cowboy man. What did he have under his hat? Upon exiting the school building, his brain exploded through his ears. Individual chunks of his brain careened through the school yard dodging trees, and large vascilating sea animals. One chunk in particular, landed upon the brow of one(1) very obsequeous mole woman. She immediately proceeded to lick the chunk from her microbe sized greasy forehead by way of a pimpled tongue which protruded from her left tentacle. I thought only boys had tentacles.

One day, Jack decided to get up and go to school as usual. He got out of bed, dressed, and ate breakfast. Finally, he went out the door and walked to school, where he had a perfectly normal day.

...which I suppose is a warning of sorts.

Holy my crap, you need immediately to go to Homestar Runner's site and check out this toon.

Make sure you have sound. It's pretty much one of the best toons they've ever done.

Rock rock on.

What, I ask you, could be more thrilling than a 7' tall professional athlete, dressed in plate armor with a chain mail undercoating? How about a weaponized wheelchair? How about the on-screen death of Jud Nelson (who, by the way, hasn't aged a day since The Breakfast Club)?

This very AM, I was fortunate enough to catch the final half-hour of Shaquille O'neal's cinematic tour de force, Steel: a cutesy little tale of ex-Army scientists who try to defend Los Angeles from a less benevolent ex-Army scientist and his attempts to distribute ultra-sophisticated weaponry (some sorts of laser pistols, it would seem) to some rather unsavory locals.

Would any Shaq film be complete without a rap "song" from the man himself? Though I can't seem to recall the title of this wunderwerk, I can assure myself (and the rest of you!) that it must have been a pure masterpiece.

I am left in awe of Shaquille and his "triple-threat" ability. Just as he owns the court, he enforces his dominion over the musical and cinematic entertainment industries.

Here's to Shaq. I salute you, Big Guy. Keep up the great work!

Allow me to weigh in on my initial impressions of Mozilla's Firefox:

It rocks the crap out of MSIE, hands down.

Dan has already mentioned most of the reasons, so I won't go into them, but let me say this:

As a student who frequently writes papers while researching, I have always found it frustrating to have 3 to 4 browser windows open plus my word processor. It becomes difficult to see which pages are which, and it's an eye-killer just trying to look at the bar. With Firefox, all I'll ever need open are two windows, that's it. By sacrificing a centimeter of space in my browser window (though if I'm remembering properly, it's made up by the lack of a useless grey bar at the bottom), I save time and aggravation galore. I'd say it's worth it.

Gotta fly. I think I just wanted to make my first post in Danland, so now I have. More Brian-esque contributions will inevitably follow in the near future.

I just went and did something potentially wacky...I've decided to allow people to register with my website, and when registered, submit content for consideration to be published.

You can still comment freely without having to register/log in, but now you have the possibility of having your own post on my site!

Yeah.

I know.

You're as thrilled as a sleeping sloth on a summer day. But hey, this is mostly intended for my family and close friends, so don't feel bad if I toss everything you send my way.

I figure this is a good way to get more interesting content on my website, rather than trying to provide it all myself.

All right, this isn't going to be much of an interesting post, but I've found lately that writing is somewhat of a gentle opiate for my oft raging boredom. So I'm writing. Because I'm bored. But you figured that out already...

While I'm writing, I figured I'd extoll the glories of the Mozilla project's Firefox web browser. I use it exclusively at home, and nearly so at work - the time sheet system requires IE.

Now, as anti-Microsoft as I am, I wouldn't be writing about Firefox in this manner if it was merely an alternative. I'm writing this (and using it) because I've really found it to be a superior product. Here are some of the mighty strengths:

1. Tabbed browsing - allows you to have multiple pages open in the same window, on seperate tabs. May not sound like a vast improvement over multiple windows, but a) when you get used to it, you can't live without it, because b) it makes keeping related pages together a snap, among other things.

2. Excellent pop-up blocking - easier to manage than IE's new joint, I feel.

3. The powerful support of open-source software. Whether the security vulnerabilities are fewer because of a smaller user base or not, when problems do arise they're tackled quickly - big or small. That's because rather than a profit-driven firm trying to convey an image of reliability, we have a group around the world dedicated to creating/maintaining/using software that actually works well.

4. Extensions - wow, I just discovered this recently, and it has the potential to be extraordinarily powerful. Here's an example: I installed an extension called Adblock, only 70k in size. This allows me to block on the page advertisements, be they from Google or otherwise. This is pretty serious, because it allows me to see many of my favorite pages without flashing, bandwidth eating advertisements.

I know several friends who have already switched, and I know Valerie pretty much uses it all the time on our home computer without any complaints or difficulty switching.

I figure the more people that try to spread the news about Firefox, the bigger dent we can make in the boys of Redmond. And once one piece of open-source software starts to make an impact, more people will be accepting of others that come after, like the exciting Open Office project. Check it out, you won't regret it.

I'm happy to announce that yesterday, my wife Valerie and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary!

In an age and culture where marriage is cheap, I'm proud that we've lasted this long, and we both look forward to years and years down the road.

I love you baby :-)

So I frequent the website Engadget, all about the latest nerdy tech stuff, and they have an article on the site today about this rediculous new weight loss device which uses a vacuum pump to do something or other. The greatest part about this article?

"...Or you could walk outside in this thing and get punched in the gut a few times for looking like a dork. Either way the point is to get your blood moving, so go for the pressure chamber gut hickey if you must."

I'm pretty jazzed, in an extraordinarily nerdy fashion...

See, this week I've been in UNIX training, paid for by work. The guy who teaches the class is everything I'd expect from somebody who spends all his time in this world...and I like that. Today, he asked us (the three of us in the class) if anyone had a spare box (computer) lying around. I said I did, and so he suggested that I bring it into the classroom tomorrow. Basically, he's going to install the latest version of Redhat Fedora Core 4 on my machine.

Why am I jazzed about this?

Because this guy's a freakin' professional, and he's certainly going to do a far better job configuring my machine for Linux than my sorry arse did. This means I'll finally have a stable, powerful development environment for learning some of the stuff I've been meaning to.

Woot. Hooray for nerds!

So last night I was sitting on my sofa, alone in my apartment, when it finally struck me. I figured out the redesign for this website, and in my excitement began drawing it out on a piece of plain printer paper.

Whether or not you've been in my apartment, I'll explain the concept: Valerie and I have this really cool sculpture/relief thingy that her grandfather gave us. It's a scene of Salerno, Italy, right on the docks, and is made entirely from pieces of cut sheet brass and heavy brass wire. Absolutely awesome, and I hope to do it justice with my site redesign, however long it takes (yeah, maybe even a year...I'm that amature).

I hope to start hammering out the structural design first over the next few weeks as I dig through my books on PHP and a borrowed book called Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman. After that's straight, I'll start hashing out the appearance using the magic of CSS (that's to make it look pretty!).

Anyway, now that the creative block is out of my head, I can finally say with confidence that the redesign is officially underway!

Yesterday was a great day for football! Quick Recap (in order of I-care-ness):

1. The Miami Dolphins trounced the Denver Broncos 34-10, making new coach Nick Saban look pretty good at the start of the season!
2. The New York Giants ran over the Arizona Cardinals 42-19 proving that Eli Manning isn't just the lackluster novelty lil' bro of Payton...
3. The Pittsburg Steelers handed Tennessee their collective behind at 34-7 to show us that Rothlesburger still has what it takes (even without Plex), and
4. Peyton Manning and his Colts nearly took Baltimore with a shutout at 24-7 (the Ravens scored with 13 seconds left), with Indianapolis' defense surprising NFL fans everywhere.

Sixteen weeks left in the season, and I still have to watch tonight's game since McNabb is the lead QB on my fantasy team, the Jersey Trash.